America's Biggest Export

While the right-wing propaganda machine has always influenced what Republicans refer to as “the silent majority”, shaping voting patterns, media discourse and public emotions – it was always something that belonged in the cuckoo’s nest of American politics. Loud, erratic and never really taken seriously by the establishment. What Trump changed was not the content, but the form. The culture war was no longer just internal noise but became a structural logic. This time around, conflict became moralized, erased material conditions and class antagonisms morphed into symbolic battles over identity, morality and national loyalty.

This logic is now global. Across Europe, politicians have adopted its language, not just to appeal to existing constituencies, but to produce new ones out of moral panic. And nowhere is this clearer than in Sweden, where both liberal and reactionary figures have repurposed American culture war rhetoric to justify foreign policy, militarization and a redefinition of the political field. In many ways, it’s not really about the culture itself, but rather a method of ignoring of the violent monopoly and economy in favour of forming the “common sense” in society.           

The U.S. has in this sense exported the “culture wars”, made clear through the ways politicians around the world have adapted their language. One phrase comes to mind, “the axis of evil”, which was first used by George W. Bush in his 2002 state of the union address, referring to Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

This phrase dominates the view that many politicians or world leaders hold, and in turn they adapt their language to fit the U.S. imperial agenda. The rhetoric has permeated the performance of geopolitics – with the new axis of evil being China, Iran, Russia and North Korea. What emerges is an imposed alignment to a "good versus evil"  crisis, where China, Iran and Russia are the world’s sponsors of terrorism ­– and therefore gives U.S. the right to unlimited access to other sovereign states military bases. This framework lies at the core of the exported culture wars. In most places where the US establishes a military presence, local political language tends to shift toward Washington’s agenda – sometimes subtly, sometimes bluntly.           

After 7 October 2023, this rhetoric resurfaced. Just two weeks later, then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared on Face the Nation that, “[t]here’s an axis of evil in the world: China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. And we need to stand up to the axis of evil, not try to do business with them.” The statement echoed Bush-era rhetoric almost word-for-word, but in a new geopolitical context with Israel now positioned as a frontline defender of “the West.” What followed was a cascade of rhetorical mimicry: politicians across Europe began reactivating this moral framework, aligning their language with Washington’s worldview.

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In Sweden – Joar Forssell, a Liberal Party MP, injected this language directly into Swedish public discourse by using a literal google translated Swedish version of the phrase, “ondskans axelmakter”, in Parliament, major newspapers and across his social media platforms. While the phrase never caught on with the general Swedish public, it reflected a broader realignment: a liberal adoption of the US strategic lexicon, used to morally justify militarization. 

But Forssell’s simplified worldview where, “Russia is fascist, China is communist, and Iran is Islamist” – fits neatly into Washington’s imperial logic. Historically and today, Swedish liberalism has had little trouble aligning with US wars under the banner of a “free and open society.” It creates a perfect breeding ground for a society interested in fighting the liberal fight under the ideological supervision of the US empire. It is thus not outside the realm of the liberal senses both historically and in contemporary politics to justify one’s own warmongering.

This continued elsewhere. Rishi Sunak, then UK Prime Minister, called the new 'big three' "an axis of authoritarian states,” this time adding North Korea into the mix. The phrase was softened by figures like former secretary general of NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg, who opted for “authoritarian alliance” instead – less loaded, but with the same moral clarity, that is, working against Western democracies. The logic was the same, only the language had evolved.

This isn’t just a revival of a Bush-era rhetoric that sits at the forefront of discourse – but rather a form of cultural import, an American logic of “culture war”. In Sweden, the Social Democrats’ 2022 NATO U-turn illustrated how culture war logic feeds militarization. Officially, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced the shift. In reality, Vladimir Putin had caused a moral panic that allowed the military-industrial complex to seize the perfect opportunity. NATO membership became a symbol of virtue and dissent could be cast as suspect. A new era of culture war had started.

Although the logic surrounding the “axis of evil” seems to have been somewhat undone during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The idea of right-wing reactionaries bringing their own sense of moral clarity to public discourse has now become a two-lane political fight. Sweden has in many ways internalized the U.S. culture war, whether it be the moral panic, identity-based polarization or their own version of outrage media.

This was already apparent on 8 May, 2023 – when Sweden Democrats MP, Björn Söder, declared on X that “the culture war has begun.” It was from his part, as with many right-wing reactionaries, a way to finally phase out the supposed socialist influence that has trickled down, or upwards – it’s not always clear, even awakening Sweden’s dormant bourgeoisie, long asleep at the wheel, which historically has been more invested in consensus and capitalist economic stability rather than open ideological war. They are now instead echoing culture war rhetoric in the name of freedom and open society. 

By 2024, this mentality had become a solidified logic in Swedish society, most notably exemplified during the pro-Palestine encampment, Palestine Garden, which was forcibly dismantled by Swedish police outside Lund University after 16 days. The students’ demands were straightforward and certainly not anything out of the ordinary: that Lund University issue a statement of solidarity with Palestine and cut ties with Israeli institutions and companies complicit in the occupation. They had pointed to Lund University’s double standard in supporting Ukraine and ending deals with Russian institutions while remaining silent on Palestine. The students did not reject solidarity with Ukraine itself; rather, this highlighted the inconsistency and the university’s susceptibility to the moral panic that Russia had caused. The irony was obvious when Vice Chancellor Erik Renström insisted that it was not the role of the university to conduct foreign policy, and that academic freedom should be safeguarded.

Yet this did not stop representatives of the bourgeois right-wing alliance from participating in the reactionary outcry by calling for harsher measures against the students. The Confederation of Swedish Conservative and Liberal Students, for example, urged the police to “stop coddling protestors and put a foot down”, demands that were soon realized when the encampment was violently cleared. The framing of the protests as illegal and the idea that student activists should be met with brute force was echoed across the spectrum of bourgeois liberals and right-wing MPs and influencers alike.

This all culminated in police forcibly dragging students from the site, many non-violent, using illegal force, including kneeling on students’ backs and chokeholds, in what can only be deemed a completely disproportionate response to peaceful protest. The police had initially tried to justify their actions with the false claim that students had thrown glass bottles at an ambulance, retracting that statement only after ambulance staff gave contradictory testimony.

This comes as Sweden has been quietly reshaping its security architecture. Parliament introduced so-called search zones where police may frisk anyone without individual suspicion and adopted a law allowing anonymous witnesses in criminal trials. At the same time the government has proposed extending secret surveillance on children under the age of fifteen, a measure still awaiting parliamentary approval. While justified as crime-fighting measures, these legal changes lay the groundwork for legitimizing repression. Using this logic of security, it is not impossible to imagine how this lowers the threshold for repression on peaceful activists

That today’s politics are saturated with these kinds of ideological battles should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the rapid imposition of the neoliberal world order after the collapse of the USSR – further fuelled by militarization of countries backed up by US imperialism. Although Sweden has historically echoed American Cold War-era anti-communist views, thus aligning itself with the “free world”, it was always cautiously part of a broader geopolitical strategy that Sweden remain “neutral” on the international political stage.

But this doesn’t take away from the fact that Swedish elites have long been receptive to US ideological framing. Former Prime Minister Carl Bildt, recruited at age 23 in the 1970s through a US State Department program that had CIA oversight during the Cold War, symbolizes how political actors were groomed within pro-Western networks. Later disclosures, including leaked US diplomatic cables, revealed Bildt’s unusually close ties to Washington and his habit of giving American officials inside perspectives on Swedish politics. This early exposure shaped a generation of policymakers and intellectuals who aligned Swedish foreign and domestic policy with US strategic interests. A lineage that today supports the adoption of American culture war rhetoric in Swedish public life.

This had been going on before the 1986 assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme shattered the political consensus, when Swedish public life still largely revolved around the ideals of Folkhemmet (the People’s home), egalitarianism and universal welfare. Public debate centered on material issues such as pensions, education reform, family support and healthcare rather than imported moral panics. Although immigration and identity only began to emerge as wedge issues in the 1990s and 2000s – right around the time the USSR collapsed and Bildt conveniently became the Swedish prime minister – it wasn’t until the 2015 migration crisis that these issues became central to Swedish political discourse. From then on, politics increasingly mirrored the culture war logic of the United States, with debates over gender, immigration and national identity culminating in today’s obsession with LGBTQ rights, drag-panics and “woke” culture – echoing the tone and outrage-driven style of US cable news.

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This shift happened conveniently just after some of the deepest privatizations in Sweden’s welfare history, carried out under the bourgeois coalition government between 2006-2014 under prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. During this period, private companies gained direct access to tax-financed welfare, with profits freely distributed to shareholders. 

Internationally, this project became known as ‘the Swedish experiment,’ referring to the radical privatization of welfare and especially the for-profit school system. To this day, Sweden remains one of the only countries in the world where tax-financed private schools are allowed to operate for profit, with dividends paid out to shareholders.

Despite this bourgeois-right wing coalition, people like Forssell and Söder still share little ideologically: one is a liberal and the other a hard-right nationalist – and both adhere to elements of each other’s reactionary politics. However, this synthesis of ideologies may break new paths in Sweden’s political future and upcoming election. Forcing the Sweden Democrats to follow US imperial logic, by supporting its proxies like Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, makes sense in their eyes because they are already opposed to the enemies of those proxies: the so-called "axis of evil". To these actors, the enemies that are Iran, Russia, China and North Korea mirror the enemies they’ve constructed at home through the culture war: Muslims, leftists and so-called non-Swedes. In both cases, the logic is the same. Loyalty to the nation means loyalty to empire.

This fierce critique of societal decay, blamed on socialists, was never about genuine reform – this is why their ideological pivot comes so easy when elections approach. For the Sweden Democrats, the battle is always cultural, and for liberals, it’s always imperial.           

This logic was further mimicked during the sudden controversy around drag performances in Sweden. In 2023, the Sweden Democrats launched attacks on taxpayer funded “Drag Story Hour” readings for children, copied and pasted from US right-wing moral panic. Sweden Democrats party leader, Jimmie Åkesson, called it “absolutely insane,” echoing the American narrative that frames queer visibility as state-sponsored decadence and grooming of children – again, pointing to this societal cultural decay supposedly caused by socialists. However, LGBTQ-rights weren’t always politicized as culture-war issues. A prime example of this is when parliament legalized same-sex marriage in 2009– with an overwhelming outcome of 261–22 in parliament. The few dissenters came from the Christian Democrats, who alone framed it as a moral, existential matter. But still, homophobia was not a wedge issue. Instead, this mirrored Sweden being a liberal and secular society where questions surrounding sexuality belonged to individual freedom – not ideological conflict. But the debate is never about the event itself, even though it resulted in local bans and harassment. It illustrates how the Swedish right-wing have imported American-style moral panic, a political template from the US with the aim of clinging it onto the Swedish media cycle.          

In Sweden, the culture war doesn’t wear a MAGA hat. It wears a suit, speaks in English-accented Swedish and justifies militarism with moral righteousness. Whether voiced by liberal MPs or nationalist reactionaries, it ends up sounding the same. This isn’t crude Americanization, it’s about learning to speak empire fluently.